Regulations

In 2019, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been reacting to the public catching on to its blatant partisanship and prioritization of corporations and ultrawealthy donors by undergoing some image rehab. Unfortunately, the Chamber’s substantive policy agenda remains as regressive as ever—anti-family, anti-worker, anti-consumer and anti-climate.

For an example of the Chamber putting lipstick on a pig, look no further than its recently-unveiled “American Energy: Cleaner, Stronger” agenda released through its Global Energy Institute (GEI). The agenda uses lots of buzzwords like “clean,” “renewable,” and “sustainable,” and its acknowledgement that climate change is a clear and present danger demanding action could easily trick you into thinking that the Chamber has softened its historical opposition to meaningful climate action. But this is merely PR-driven smoke and mirrors.

A closer look at what the agenda proposes reveals that it’s actually a continuation of that opposition, proposing that climate change be “resolved” through the private sector rather than through legislation and regulation, and advocating America’s continued reliance on fossil fuels. By the Chamber’s own admission, the purpose of the agenda is to obstruct public action on climate: it warns of “state and national leaders go[ing] too far with policy recommendations” and proposes that instead the private sector should lead the way through “innovation and technology.” This is a tactic Frank Luntz promoted all the way back in 2002: use language that makes you sound knowledgeable and reasonable to get away with maintaining inaction on climate change.

This plan is not remotely sufficient to meet the enormous challenge of addressing our climate needs. The international consensus on climate change estimates that we have only 12 years to cut global greenhouse gas pollution in half in order to avoid potentially catastrophic amounts of global warming. No one who has studied the issue could say with a straight face that we can reach that target through “innovation and technology” alone drastic government policy change is needed to zero out U.S. pollution on the timetable we need. In fact, the Chamber even posits that climate action should not be time constrained (with targets like 10 or 12 years in mind), even though the nature of the climate change problem requires that we solve it quickly.

The Chamber does not intend to actually meet the task of preventing unacceptable levels of climate change; it just wants plausible deniability against accusations of being a bad actor on climate. The Chamber knows it needs to adjust to the reality that voters are increasingly concerned about climate change, but has chosen to do so in a way that opposes real solutions. The reality is that deregulation and continued reliance on fossil fuels will make things worse, not better.

Goosing Up the Numbers

The Chamber justifies taking this inadequate approach by using some very suspect public opinion polling, commissioned by the Chamber/GEI and conducted by FTI Consulting. As argued by clean energy policy analyst Joel Stronberg, the survey’s questions are designed in a loaded way aimed toward achieving the kinds of results the Chamber wants. For instance, the Chamber’s results show respondent sentiment is only weakly in favor of “[r]equiring all aspects of the U.S. economy to eliminate greenhouse gas pollution in 10 years, including in all electricity generation, vehicles, agriculture, homes, commercial buildings, and manufacturing, regardless of cost.”

This question is clearly designed to invoke various connotations. For one, the “10 year” time-frame primes respondents to be thinking about the proposed solution as a stand-in for the Green New Deal (GND), which has been widely vilified through right wing media’s disinformation about its actual contents. Furthermore, the long list of types of institutions that would require elimination of greenhouse gas pollution is meant to feel exhaustive to the respondent, thereby priming them to think what is being suggested is excessive or an “overreach.” Finally, the phrase “regardless of cost” is suggestive of criticisms that taxpayers as a whole will shoulder an unreasonable financial burden in order to pay for large-scale government action on climate.

It’s worth noting that, even despite the many ways this question was loaded, it still received 55% total support, meaning a majority of respondents still approved of the policy.

Another of the Chamber’s findings from its survey is even more dubious. It pits the “Cleaner, Stronger” agenda against the GND, and asks respondents which approach they prefer, and finds that across the political spectrum, the majority of respondents preferred “Cleaner, Stronger.”

Specifically, respondents were asked “Which option would you prefer as a focus of our national and state elected leaders?” and given to options to choose between:

‘Cleaner, Stronger’: America focusing on using its resources responsibly and safely by implementing a ‘cleaner, stronger’ energy agenda that prioritizes investments in innovation and advanced technology to reduce emissions.

Eliminating Greenhouse Gas Emissions: America focusing on requiring a transition to the Green New Deal’s proposal to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. economy in 10 years, regardless of cost.

As Stronberg argues, “The comparison of its announced Cleaner, Stronger America Agenda with the GND alone is deceitful. Only in a two-way comparison of the GND and the Chamber’s American Energy: Cleaner, Stronger campaign can rejection of the one be considered support for the other—even then such a conclusion would be suspect.”

The question falsely implies that pursuing a GND-style approach will not involve any investment in innovation and technology. It also uses the same misleading language to stand in for the GND as it did earlier, portraying the GND as a radical policy and “Cleaner, Stronger” as more measured and therefore reasonable. A GEI press release calls “Cleaner, Stronger” a “realistic alternative to addressing energy and environmental issues.”

What this framing leaves out is that a reliance on the private sector could itself be easily portrayed as the more radical policy. Taking strong legislative action against climate change is a commonsense way of ensuring that the United States meets its global climate action responsibility; pursuing a deregulatory agenda is a recipe for making climate change worse rather than better. But the Chamber wants us thinking about only about the political ease of each approach, rather than what is actually needed to properly address climate change.

The Cleaner, Stronger agenda’s use of PR-friendly buzzwords and highly questionable survey methods is all aimed at a singular goal: deregulating the energy industry, allowing fossil fuel industries to continue to profit off the emission of greenhouse gases that will have a devastating effect on the climate. We should not fall for this deception. The Chamber may pretend its plan is a sufficient response to climate change, but we must be honest that avoiding catastrophic levels of global warming requires significant legislative and regulatory action.

Never at a loss for spinning its corporate-friendly agenda as somehow benefiting working Americans, yesterday’s “2019 State of American Business Address” by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s CEO, Thomas J. Donohue, was a textbook example of using syrupy public relations-friendly language to mask the Chamber’s true intent. The speech laid out the Chamber’s policy priorities for 2019 and for the newly sworn-in 116th Congress in characteristically rosy terms.

A closer look at what was officially called the “#AmericanDreams” speech, though, paints a starkly different picture from how it sounded on its surface. The vision Donohue laid out—of maintaining private, for-profit healthcare; of an unregulated pharmaceutical industry free to price gouge consumers; of unrestrained use of fossil fuels that would pollute our environment and further contribute to climate change; of policies preventing consumers and workers from suing corporations that have harmed or discriminated against them; and of a total lack of transparency in corporate political spending—would be more like an American Nightmare for the average citizen.

When Donohue claims that the state of the economy is extremely strong, what he really means is that it’s great if you’re a CEO or wealthy stockholder raking in record corporate profits and increased share values due to record stock buybacks. However, the average American has been facing years of wage stagnation, job insecurity, underemployment, and a dangerous lack of worker protections. And, when he says “prudent regulation,” he means fewer safeguards for workers, consumers, and the public at large.

The Chamber’s well-funded and heavily-staffed lobby machine can be very savvy. So, when it says it will “take bipartisanship into account” we know that means that with a Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives in the 116th Congress, the Chamber cannot simply rely on congressional Republicans to pass its corporate agenda alone, as it’s done for years. And though the Chamber has added bipartisanship as a criterion in its 2019 legislative scorecard (at 10% of total score, making it roughly the weighted equivalent of the “participation” grade in an average college class), these feints toward moderation are merely PR. Its policy advocacy is no less extreme in its tilt toward corporations and the extremely wealthy folks who make up its donor base and against the average consumer, worker or family.

To wit: Donohue promises to “use all of our resources to combat” a single-payer healthcare system. Although such a system would overwhelmingly benefit the average American and is tremendously popular with the public, it would endanger the Chamber’s corporate buddies in the health industry, so the Chamber is now threatening to oppose it with all of its considerable lobbying might. Elsewhere in the speech, Donohue claims that protests of natural gas pipelines and the push to keep fossil fuels in the ground are causing undue strain on American traditional energy producers. In reality, this decline is because those entities are themselves fossils, tied to a business model that is no longer profitable (let alone prudent given the clear evidence of climate change). This willfully misleading stance proves the Chamber is just as beholden to the fossil fuel industry as ever.

Later in the speech, Donohue claims that Americans’ right to file civil and class action suits “undermines justice” when really it protects vulnerable populations from powerful wealthy interests. And, when the Chamber says that the U.S. should restrict shareholder rights to “reform” publicly-owned corporations’ policies on matters such as disclosure of political spending, it really means it wants average investors to have less of a say and intends to do all it can to ensure secret money continues to be dumped into political campaigns.

In all of these cases, the Chamber’s policy goal amounts to letting corporations do whatever they want with zero accountability and zero protection for the public interest. The Chamber may be attempting to put on a fresh new face to deal with a new Congress, but rest assured, its agenda is as pro-corporate and anti-Main Street as ever. Perhaps instead of promising to stand for “every child, every family, every worker, and every entrepreneur,” a more honest promise would be that the Chamber stands for “every corporation, every billionaire, every Big Bank, and every CEO.”

If you have followed Chamber Watch for long, you are intimately familiar with the reactionary, anti-democratic agenda of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As the nation’s largest lobbying group, the Chamber is the poster-child for the toxic influence of moneyed interests in our system. As the largest spender of secret money on political advertisements, the Chamber ensures that the public remains unaware of who is funding it, allowing its billionaire donors to remain in the shadows while pouring unfathomable sums into our broken campaign finance system. And by bullying opponents into submission with overwhelming capacity for corporate litigation, it plays a key role in hindering government efforts to impose and enforce commonsense safeguards and reforms protecting consumers, workers and the environment.

The Chamber is a key bad actor, but it is not the only anti-democratic force in our system today. Our democracy is in crisis because of the influence of the corporate behemoths and billionaire donors on officials in power. The nexus between moneyed interests and office-holders has resulted in profoundly broken institutions that fail to protect average Americans the way they are meant to.

From voter suppression to open defiance of the rule of lawto unchecked ethical violations, American democracy is under a constant onslaught of attacks. The power of special interests in politics have been wreaking havoc on our democracy for decades, resulting in a nation where average Americans have very little say over the direction the country is headed in and which policies are being enacted.

But thankfully, a new coalition of over 100 organizations inside and outside Washington, representing a diverse range of issue areas and constituencies, has emerged to confront the monstrosity of corporate moneyed influence. The member organizations individually advocate for a number of different issues, but all of them commonly recognize that the only way to move forward on their particular issues is to start with foundational, systemic reforms. This coalition, the Declaration for American Democracy, made its formal debut via a press conference on October 30. Now, following the midterm elections, the Declaration for American Democracy is committed to advocating for a large number of top-to-bottom reforms to address America’s crisis of democracy, starting with demands made of the 116th Congress.

The basic demands of the Declaration for American Democracy are:

Our democracy must ensure the freedom to vote and have that vote counted.

Our democracy must be honest.

Our democracy must have meaningful participation.

Our democracy must provide transparency into our government and our elections.

Our democracy must be responsive.

The U.S. Chamber is a massive wrecking ball, bringing destruction to our democracy through its multipronged efforts of lobbying, secret money campaign finance spending. It and other groups representing massive corporate and billionaire funds have caused tremendous damage to our democracy.

But it is not too late to repair our democracy, and bolster its foundations to prevent this kind of crisis from ever arising again. By following the Declaration for American Democracy and supporting its efforts, you can take action to demand much-needed structural reform to our system. This is our democracy—not the U.S. Chamber’s, nor wealthy donors’. It’s time we reclaim it.

As the country anxiously watches the Senate Judiciary Committee conduct hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice, the nation’s political dialogue has been ablaze. Not to be left out, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined the fray recently with a blog post titled “The Right Judge for the Job.” The post, by Chamber president Tom Donohue, is exactly what it sounds like: a full-throated endorsement of Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

Public Citizen’s U.S. Chamber Watch project has frequently exposed the Chamber’s long-established right-wing leanings, from its campaign donations to the revolving door of staffers between the Chamber and various conservative institutions. But even by the Chamber’s standards, this endorsement is jaw-dropping. As the Chamber claims to be a politically unbiased institution only looking out for business interests, you would be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at the Chamber endorsing President Trump’s recent Supreme Court nominee. When you begin to dig into Judge Kavanaugh’s history of rulings, though, the Chamber’s support for his confirmation starts to make a whole lot of sense.

In a recent report, Chamber Watch found that in 25 of the 33 cases (76%) in which the Chamber, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), or the American Petroleum Institute (API) participated as party or amicus curiae, Kavanaugh sided with the position advanced by the business groups.

This investigation serves to underscore the extent to which the Chamber’s legal activity now intersects with federal policy. As Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, put it, “Over the past several decades, big business associations, led by the Chamber, have become far more active in federal litigation. The involvement of these associations signals to judges what the Chamber and other trade associations believe to be important.”

It is also consistent with another recent Public Citizen report that found that in 87% of cases, Judge Kavanaugh’s opinion in split-decision on issues like regulatory issues, environmental protection, and worker rights sided with Big Business and against the public interest. These issues are some of the Chamber’s top priorities; the Chamber wants fewer consumer safeguards, fewer environmental standards, and fewer labor protections, because those policies let it pursue higher profits no matter the human cost.

With all of this in mind, the Chamber’s fulsome endorsement of Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation begins to look brazenly self-interested. It wants an ally on the Court who will rule with its arguments in litigation and with its policy agenda. Based on Kavanaugh’s history of rulings, it may have made a safe bet.

After the financial industry’s crash in 2008, taxpayers footed a bill for hundreds of billions of dollars for bank bailouts. In the wake of the crash, the U.S. government failed to prosecute any of the top bankers responsible for it. And, last December, the G.O.P. passed a tax cut that showered more wealth on bankers than any other sector. In so many ways, the sector responsible for a global economic meltdown has been rewarded, not punished, for their misconduct.

Apparently, this lack of consequences isn’t good enough for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. After the U.S. House of Representatives passed S. 2155, dubbed the “Bank Lobbyist Act” by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, on May 22, the Chamber released a statement applauding the passage of the banking deregulatory bill (which was subsequently signed into law by the president). The Chamber pushed hard for this bill: it issued key letters to both the Senate and House, and hosted an event earlier in the year with acting CFPB director Mick Mulvaney and Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon calling for “bank relief.” S. 2155, which reduces oversight over many banks and rolls back a number of the consumer protections enacted in the Dodd-Frank Act’s reforms, is just the sort of giveaway to Wall Street that the Chamber has consistently advocated for.

As is the Chamber’s M.O., advocating for this bill was couched in the language of “restoring small business lending” and abolishing “one-size-fits-all regulations” that were supposedly hampering small community banks. The problem is that that’s not an accurate reflection of the country’s economic landscape prior to the bill’s passage, nor is it a good description of what the bill actually does.

The reality is that the “Bank Lobbyist Act” reduces oversight on 25 of the 38 biggest banks. It strips away many critical consumer protections, including provisions to prevent racial discrimination in lending. It removes many of the guidelines keeping banks from engaging in the same sort of risky gambling activity that led to the crash just ten years ago. And, of course, when banks gamble with their deposits, those are funds that are not being used for the loans people need to buy a home or start a business. Allowing this sort of risky banking practices is setting up American taxpayers to potentially be on the hook for another bailout on their dime should the financial sector crash again.

As for those supposedly hamstrung banks the Chamber is supposedly selflessly looking out for? They were already doing just fine before the bill passed. The industry reaped a record $56 billion in net income in the first quarter of 2018. Even the small banks, whose financial wellness the Chamber prioritizes in its PR materials, were hardly suffering; loan balances at community banks rose significantly more in 2017 than across all banks. And the Chamber claims that small business owners have been hobbled by a lack of availability of credit in recent years, but according to the Federal Reserve’s September 2017 report, credit availability for small businesses has greatly improved in recent years and reached a stable point. It seems community banks and small businesses are just a smokescreen to make this Wall Street giveaway, the true goal of the bill, more palatable.

After the 2008 crisis, bankers did just fine. It’s the American people who suffered, losing countless jobs, savings, and homes. For the U.S. Chamber, it looks like risking a repeat of the Great Recession is worth it for the sake of Wall Street lining its pockets.

This week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will host its annual Small Business Summitin Washington, DC. The stated purpose of the three day event is to provide small businesses with tools and strategies “to successfully compete in today’s rapidly changing business environment.” While this sounds well and good, the Chamber unsurprisingly fails (yet again) to mention that its role as “the voice of small business” is really just a sham.

The Summit agenda consists of a multitude of panels, including “How to Get Your Company Thinking Like a Startup,” “Your State’s Lawsuit Climate and How It Affects Small Businesses,” and “How and Why Your Business Grows (or Doesn’t).” Sure, these panels sound innocent enough to someone who isn’t well-versed on the Chamber, but in reality—they hide the many times the Chamber has lobbied to stack the deck against small businesses. We’ve taken the liberty of renaming and reframing the Summit panels so that they are more honest about the Chamber’s relationship with small business:

Litigating Against Small Business for Beginners: Chamber vs. Main Street

Looking to keep consumers out of court? Hoping to sue a mom-and-pop shop? This panel is for you!

While the Chamber may claim to be the voice of small businesses in Washington, when it comes to litigation, it can be consistently relied upon to favor the huge corporations that fund it. Whether it’s arguing for reduced access to the courts, opposing stricter supervision of Wall Street banks designed to reduce the risk of future financial crises, fighting for Big Oil against emissions controls, or supporting Big Pharma’s schemes to keep drug prices sky high, the Chamber always comes down on the side of its deep-pocketed Big Business patrons, ignoring the impact on small businesses. In fact, in a report earlier this year, Chamber Watch found that the Chamber files a brief roughly every other day of the work week, and in almost 60 percent of cases, the Chamber supported at least one Fortune 500 company. In comparison, it supported a domestic small business only 7 percent of the time. In fact, it supported a foreign multinational twice as often as it did a domestic small business. Companies the Chamber litigated on behalf of included State Farm, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Allstate, Berkshire Hathaway, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, AIG, and JP Morgan Chase, ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, BP, PPL, and Shell, to name a few.

Regulations help Small Business? Deny Deny Deny 101

Have you heard the term “red tape” but aren’t sure how to work it into every day conversation? Stop by this lecture to hear from Chamber experts on their experience in denying that regulations actually help rather than hurt small businesses. This panel will equip you with all the tools you need to ignore the statistics that show small businesses support regulation and steer the conversation elsewhere. Did someone say red tape?

The Chamber has a long history of opposing regulations under the guise of being a voice for small business. From the overtime rule, to the Clean Water Rule to the Clean Power Plan, to the open internet rules (have we made our point?) it has yet to meet a regulation it didn’t want rolled back. According to a poll by Small Business Majority, 86 percent of small business owners agree some regulation of business is necessary for a modern economy, and 93 percent of them agree their business can live with some regulation if it is fair, manageable and reasonable. What’s more, 78 percent of small employers agree regulations are important in protecting small businesses from unfair competition and to level the playing field with big business. Another 79 percent of small business owners support having clean air and water in their community in order to keep their family, employees and customers healthy, and 61 percent support standards that move the country towards energy efficiency and clean energy.

Net Non-Neutrality: Even We Know We’re Wrong on This One

Are you an AT&T or Comcast employee who accidentally wandered into this Summit? You’re in the right place now!

The Chamber has conceded that the vast majority of Americans, support net neutrality. In fact, even smaller internet service providers (ISPs,) part of the small business community that the Chamber loves to claim to represent, support net neutrality regulations because they prevent larger competitors from gaining an unfair advantage. Proponents of net neutrality argue that by ensuring equal treatment of all internet content, companies compete on a level playing field and consumers are able to access whatever content they want without issue. Meanwhile, the Chamber and other opponents argue that net neutrality regulations limit incentives for ISPs to improve their networks. These critics argue that without charging companies to guarantee access to content, ISPs won’t have the money necessary to make these investments. In reality, investment in internet infrastructure has not decreased as a result of net neutrality regulations. That leaves only one constituency in favor of deregulation: giant telecom companies.

With its anti-small business record so clear, why does the Chamber still keep up its yearly sham? Apparently the “Big Business Summit” just doesn’t have the same ring…

Just before Congress escaped town for the Fourth of July recess, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee released its draft fiscal year 2018 Financial Services and General Government (FSGG) Appropriations bill. The FSGG appropriations bill provides annual funding for the U.S. Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), and many other important agencies.

This year, however, the bill is packed chock full of ideological policy riders that have nothing to with funding the agencies the bill is supposed to provide for, and everything to do with pleasing the House majority’s corporate masters at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. By tucking these policy riders into must-pass legislation, the House leadership ensures that they have a better chance of becoming law than they would if they were forced to stand on their own (highly dubious) merits.

It may be the Fourth of July holiday week, but the release of the draft FSGG appropriations bill is likely to have been celebrated like Christmas in July in the marble hallways of the Chamber. The draft bill provides the Chamber with a veritable avalanche of presents, probably in response to the avalanche of money the Chamber has bestowed upon GOP candidates for Congress.

The biggest gift of all to the Chamber is the provision of the draft bill that would prevent the SEC from developing a rule that would require publicly traded companies to disclose their political spending to investors, including donations to politically active trade associations like the Chamber. The secrecy-obsessed Chamber has long lobbiedagainst such a rule. It has even reached out to member companies to urge them against voluntarily disclosing such information despite the fact that more than 1.2 million investors (retail and institutional) and members of the public have called for it.

If the policy rider prohibiting the development of a political spending disclosure rule qualifies as the proverbial new car in the garage on Christmas morning, then the rider eliminating the financial independence of the CFPB qualifies as the proverbial first class tickets to Paris for the Chamber and its friends on Wall Street. Fighting the existence of a strong, independent CFPB has been a lodestar for the Chamber. Why does the Chamber hate the CFPB so much? Probably because the CFBP is doing its job, working to protect consumers from unscrupulous and sometimes illegal behavior by the big financial institutions whose interests the Chamber represents. Indeed, the CFPB has obtained $11.8 billion in relief for over 29 million consumers. That’s $11.8 billion that wasn’t available for executive bonuses and stock buy-backs.

Unfortunately, bringing the CFPB under the heal of the very politicians who are most dependent upon corporate cash for their reelections isn’t the only policy rider in the draft FSGG appropriations bill that’s a giveaway to the Chamber’s Wall Street patrons. The draft bill contains a separate rider that would repeal the Volcker Rule. The Volcker Rule prevents banks from engaging in speculative trading with depositors’ money, thereby reducing the chances of another financial crisis. Of course, the Chamber and the Big Banks don’t like the Volcker Rule because it limits Wall Street’s ability to make short term profits that in turn produce big bonuses for executives.

As if all this weren’t enough, the draft FSGG appropriations bill contains another yuge gift for the Chamber and its financial services industry backers. The draft bill contains a rider which would halt a CFPB rule restricting the use of forced arbitration clauses buried in the fine print of consumer financial contracts. The Chamber has long campaigned against limits on this “rip-off” clause. Blocking this rule would essentially allow corporations to rip off consumers with impunity, as the Wells Fargo fake account scandal litigation has shown.

While it is undoubtedly depressing that our elected officials, who are supposed to represent the people, are instead finding new and ever more creative opportunities to shower gifts on their corporate benefactors, we still have time to make our voices heard. The House FSGG appropriations bill hasn’t yet passed through the full appropriations committee. So call your congressperson and tell him or her that you object to all of these harmful policy riders whose only purpose is to please the Chamber and the giant corporations intent upon buying our democracy.

Because if we don’t stand up and make our voices heard, then they very well may wind up singing some rather special Christmas carols at the Chamber this summer.

If you’re a progressive, you might feel tempted to pop the champagne corks after the spectacular collapse of the GOP’s effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) last week making it seem as if President Trump and Republican Congress may not be ready for prime time governing.

With all of these stories dominating the news cycle, some might think that Trump administration and GOP Congress are simply not ready to govern. Hobbled by incompetence and internal squabbling, they seem to lurch from one fiasco to the next.

However, the daily headlines of scandals mask one area where Trump and the GOP Congress have been successful at advancing the Republican agenda: they have already succeeded in pursuing the most aggressive regulatory rollback since the Reagan administration.

The main driver of this deregulatory agenda is the big business behemoth that is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Sure, it may have been Steve Bannon who uttered the words, “deconstruct the administrative state,” but it is the Chamber along with its big business allies who behind this drive to gut critical public protections.

So forgive us for being Debbie Downers and for corking the champagne as we take a moment to bring you up to speed on what the GOP, Chamber, and Trump have succeeded in doing during the first two months of this administration.

The past two months have been marked by an aggressive use of the heretofore rarely used Congressional Review Act (CRA), which allows Congress to strike down regulatory protections issued in the final months of a previous administration using expedited procedures. Hundreds of public protections are at risk through the CRA, 15 have been repealed by the House, 12 in the Senate, and already 7 have been signed by Trump.

Just this week, Trump signed four more CRA resolutions. Among them was the “Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces” rule, which barred companies from receiving federal contracts if they had a history of violating wage, labor or workplace safety laws. The U.S. Chamber has been lobbying against this rule since its creation, in an effort to protect big federal contractors from being finally held accountable. Another of these was a Bureau of Land Management rule known as “Planning 2.0,” which gave the federal government a greater role in land use decisions. This rule was opposed by the energy industry, and therefore the Chamber strongly lobbied for its demise.

Unfortunately, the CRA isn’t the only tool in the Trump Administration’s toolbox. Trump has also issued several executive orders (EOs) undoing our public protections. He issued an EO mandating that two regulations are to be repealed for every new one that goes on the books. This week, he signed an EO aimed at undoing numerous climate initiatives put in place by the Obama administration. The EO includes telling the EPA and other agencies to rollback components of the Clean Power Plan, reconsider carbon standards for new coal plants, reassess methane emission regulations, as well as several other changes sought by the fossil fuel industry. And, earlier this month, Trump announced the EPA would review and likely weaken Obama’s fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks in the post-2022 period. While there may be obstacles to achieving all of this, it is still a huge step in the wrong direction if we want to have a serious chance at limiting the impacts of global warming. And, sadly, these deregulatory these moves were all sought by the Chamber, which is no stranger to battling Obama-era environmental policies. In the course of just 3 years, the Chamber opposed the EPA in court 26 times and they have lobbied on these issues for years.

Most recently, the U.S. House of Representatives did the bidding of corporate America by using the CRA to vote to repeal Broadband Privacy Protections, which prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from tracking the browsing habits of customers without their permission and place obligations on ISPs to keep their customers’ data secure, giving customers more control over their personal data and privacy. Earlier this month the Chamber sent a letter to the Science and Transportation Committee leadership urging members to vote in favor of this CRA stripping Americans of their internet privacy.

So there you have it. Trump and the GOP Congress are successfully dismantling many important public protections including those protecting clean water, clean air, worker health and safety, and internet privacy. And the Chamber has been behind most of these regulatory rollbacks we’ve seen in the past 60 days. While Steven Bannon may falsely claim that deconstructing the “administrative state” will benefit the people, the reality is that it is not the people that are behind this agenda, it is the Chamber and giant corporations that are pushing it. Empty populist rhetoric aside, the administration’s deregulatory zeal is proof positive of the overwhelming influence of its corporate masters.

Political rhetoric blaming government regulations for stifled small business growth is at an all-time high, and it’s no surprise that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is behind most of it. The Chamber has a long history of opposing regulations under the guise of being a voice for small business. Whether it’s the overtime rule that would provide overtime pay to millions of middle income Americans, the Clean Water Rule to protect our streams and rivers, the Clean Power Plan to limit power plant emissions of greenhouse gases, and the open internet rules to preserve net neutrality, the Chamber has yet to meet a regulation it didn’t want rolled back.

The Chamber also called for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), supporting the American Health Care Act, despite the 24 million who would lose health care. But it doesn’t stop there. Tom Donohue and his big business allies would also like to see a repeal of Dodd-Frank Act, and specifically condemned the Volcker Rule to limit speculative trades by banks of the kind that led to the 2008 Financial Crisis and has vowed to fight against the fiduciary rule, which protects retirement savers from dishonest investment advisors.

Not only has the Chamber come out in favor or nearly every CRA challenge we’ve seen since Trump took office, it is also a strong supporter of the Regulatory Accountability Act, which would hamstring future efforts to protect consumers, workers, and the environment by layering on so many additional process requirements that rulemaking to protect the public would essentially come to a halt. Just last week, the Chamber released two video ads, targeting Senators Heitkamp and McCaskill, urging them to support the RAA.

All of this, under the clever, yet dishonest PR scheme that regulations hurt, and never help, small businesses. It makes perfect sense- if the Chamber and big business want to accomplish the corporate windfall that would result from a deregulatory agenda, the best way to do so is to tout themselves as the advocate of Main Street.

However, many of the regulations that Donohue mentions don’t even apply to small businesses, and others, like the Clean Water Rule and the CFPB actually help small businesses.

While these conservative talking points often misleadingly focus on the burdens that regulations place on small business, surveys and poll data show that the very owners of these small businesses generally do not agree with their alleged advocates. According to a poll by Small Business Majority, 86% of small business owners agree some regulation of business is necessary for a modern economy, and 93% of them agree their business can live with some regulation if it is fair, manageable and reasonable. What’s more, 78% of small employers agree regulations are important in protecting small businesses from unfair competition and to level the playing field with big business. Another 79% of small business owners support having clean air and water in their community in order to keep their family, employees and customers healthy, and 61% support standards that move the country towards energy efficiency and clean energy. This runs directly contradictory to the Chamber’s lobbying for the repeal of Stream Protection rule, and the Oil Anti-corruption rule, which would leaving communities susceptible to water pollution by coal miners, and enable oil tycoons to avoid transparency.

Regulations do help small businesses and a lack of regulation can have detrimental effects. Just yesterday, a small business owner testified before the House Small Business Committee and urged lawmakers to ensure that public protections are in place to give his catering business fundamental confidence that the food and water they serve and consume is safe. Regulations provide the market with a basic level of certainty to ensure we are protected from tainted food, unsafe drugs, poisoned water, and polluted air.

There are other regulations, such as anti-trust laws that address price discrimination and price fixing, that help small business owners by leveling the playing field against larger businesses. The Chamber also fails to mention the many regulations enforced under the Small Business Administration that small businesses are prioritized for a certain set of government contracts.

When regulations don’t exist, it is typically small businesses who suffer most. The Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico devastated small businesses in the tourism and fishing industry, and not surprisingly it was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who went to court on behalf of British Petroleum and sought to keep the local small businesses out of court, all the while claiming to be the voice of Main Street.

While the Chamber is spending big bucks to lobby against commonsense protections, it is crucial to remember that clean air, clean water, and regulation of Wall Street protect the public. Clear rules protect small businesses and manufacturers from powerful interests who use their financial advantage to try to rig the system in their favor.

In his 2014 State of American Business Address, Donohue referred to the Chamber’s National Litigation Center as a “public interest” law firm – an insidious mischaracterization for a group that that works relentlessly to restrict consumers’ access to courts and ability to hold corporations accountable for bad behavior.

In December 2013, John Cridland, the director-general of the U.S. Chamber’s British counterpart, the Confederation of British Industry, said, “As the financial situation of many firms begins to turn a corner, one of the biggest challenges facing businesses is to deliver growth that will mean better pay and more opportunities for all their employees after a prolonged squeeze. … There are still far too many people stuck in minimum wage jobs without routes to progression – and that’s a serious challenge that businesses and the government must address.”

Until we hear Mr. Donohue say – and act on – something like the CBI’s example, the evidence overshadows his words: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants growth and opportunity for the largest corporations. Everything else is public relations.